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Comment The problem is lack of generation capacity (Score 1) 46

What these groups need to do to protect vulnerable people is to make sure we build new powerplants soon. It's so sleazy of them to act like they're trying to protect customers from paying high prices for energy when for decades they basically caused energy prices to get so high by having a problem with basically every possible way of generating energy.

Comment Re:Reduction (Score 5, Informative) 46

Keeping people employed just because is probably the reason the USPS is having the issues it already has. Cutting the workforce and cutting every other day of delivery could make a HUGE impact to their bottom line. Likely the same mail trucks could carry and deliver two days of mail every other day without needing to put more trucks on the road.

No, the USPS is having to fully fund pensions for people not born yet is what's causing the problems. If you look at the profitability graph it nosedives around year 2000 or so purely because Bush Jr and the GOP were trying to kill it by forcing it to fully fund pensions for the next 75 years or so, which includes funding pensions for people not born nor employed by the USPS.

Most companies aren't doing this which means if they go under, there goes all the pension funds. USPS pensions being fully funded means those people keep their funds when USPS goes under.

It's basically been a way to kill the USPS without killing the USPS directly.

Before this ruling came out, the USPS was really quite profitable, and those profits could've been used to fund the pensions until the obligation was met rather than force them to pay for pensions fully by going into debt.

Comment Re:Renewable fuels? (Score 1) 97

The other problem with biodiesel is there isn't enough of it. The only reason it works right now is few people are converting used oils to biodiesel for their own private purposes. If you're doing it at an industrial level there just isn't enough feed stock available.

And it doesn't work too well in cold environments - you have to start the engine using regular diesel because biodiesel when cold is basically a cold gloopy fat blob and needs regular diesel to be thinned out.

Comment Re:To All the AI Haters Out There (Score 1) 45

Hardly. There's no memory manufacturers in any way restricting production to "manufacture this shortage". They may be price fixing (they have a history of that) but right now they are producing memory at full tilt.

And if you ask why they didn't invest years ago, can you please tell me tonight's winning lotto numbers since you are so good at predicting the future?

They are also not increasing production - because the past decade they've done so and gotten screwed over - prices spike, they increase production and then demand collapses, leaving a huge oversupply of RAM and them having to dump it for low prices. So they aren't producing anymore memory than they normally could.

Instead they're switching production to things like HBM needed for the AI chips and such.

Comment Re:We used to love going to theaters... (Score 1) 58

Big screen and big sound. Maybe it doesn't mean much because you have a house in the suburbs, but if you're in an apartment (either because you don't want to commute, you want to live in a city, or it's all you can afford for housing), TV speakers are pretty much it because anything more will get you noise complaints.

Depending on your income and housing costs, you may be limited on how big a TV you can have as well.

So a theatre is pretty much the only place if you want that sort of thing.

Granted, I don't go out to theatres much anymore either - and I spent $35 on the ticket (one, for myself), mostly because I want the big screen IMAX, but it's a far drive. And the local theatres are regular screens which aren't great. I pretty much limit myself to one movie a year or so tops.

Comment Re:Part of the reason: 2038 (Score 1) 31

I believe part of the reason is the year 2038 issue. A while ago I remember seeing posts about the issues FreeBSD has/had with getting around 2038 on their system. IIRC, it was a huge effort.

*EVERY* UNIX and UNIX-like system has to deal with the problem. But it's got nothing to do with 32-bit systems, because OpenBSD and NetBSD have it working since 2012 on 32-bit systems. Linux since 2020 (Linux supported 64-bit time_t on 64-bit platforms already, but 2020 is when 32-bit systems supported it).

It's not a simple solution, but it's been done before on other systems. It's also why Linux has a bunch of system calls that are merely using 64-bit versions.

Comment Re:Payroll checks are still a thing in small biz (Score 1) 142

I get the impression that a company like ADP requires that an employer employ at least some minimum number of employees in an area. Otherwise, ADP appears to fall back to printing paper checks for the employer to mail. I don't know the specifics; I just know that I got ADP paper at one job after a bunch of layoffs, and I got ADP paper when I was the only remote worker in a particular state.

Comment Re:BSoD was an indicator (Score 1) 79

Windows NT used to give you a whole bunch of details when it hit a BSoD - NT4 bluescreens were wildly informative, but to the average user, completely useless. It was just a bunch of numbers that had no meaning to them or provide them with any pointer to what the problem was. It didn't help that many drivers adopted the 8.3 naming convention making it even more obscure.

Also completely useless because the screenful of information was there but you couldn't do anything with it - you couldn't print it or anything. Windows 2000 simplified it a lot but was still mostly useless - now instead of a screenful, it just showed the stop code with parameters and the module that triggered it. But again, mostly useless information.

The information was contained in the kernel core dumps = the critical bits in the minidumps that it creates that could be loaded into a debugger, or a full dump file. These were much more useful because you could do a post-mortem examination using a debugger with full symbols. (The data for the dump files was written to the swapfile - since the BSoD meant the kernel could not be trusted you couldn't trust the filesystem or disk block driver stack to be working, so the BSoD code would write the core dump to the known blocks of swapfile using direct disk access - it's why there are "text mode" drivers). The next reboot when the kernel starts and initializes the filesystem, before it starts swapfile it checks the swapfile for the dump and if it's there copies it to a new file.

But there were a lot of stop codes that were completely odd but the cause was hardware. There was one that basically said you had bad RAM, another one that would tell you your CPU was overheating. a third that would happen if your disk was dying, and some of the odder ones caused when your GPU was dying and causing PCI bus errors.

It was straightaway - if you see this error, replace RAM. If you see this error, check the heatsink. This error means your disk is dying. You never saw the errors for anything else.

Comment Re:Just shows he does not really understand hardwa (Score 1) 79

One major difference, assuming you've got full platform support(should be the case on any server or workstation that isn't an utter joke; but can be a problem with some desktop boards that 'support' ECC in the sense that AMD didn't laser it off the way Intel does; but don't really care); is that ECC RAM can (and should) report even correctable errors; so you get considerably more warning than you do with non-ECC RAM.

If you pay no attention to error reports ECC or non-ECC are both rolling the dice; though ECC has better odds; but 'proper' ECC and Linux-EDAC support will allow you to keep an eye on worrisome events(normally with something like rasdaemon, not sure what other options and preferences there are in terms of aggregating the kernel-provided data) and, unless the RAM fails particularly dramatically and thoroughly, will give you much better odds of knowing that you have a hardware problem while that problem is still at correctable levels; so you can take appropriate action(either replacement, or on the really fancy server systems, some 'chipkill'-like arrangement where the specific piece of DRAM that is failing gets cut out of use when deeemed unreliable without having to bring the system down.

Comment Re:BSoD was an indicator (Score 1) 79

Sometimes you'd get a BSOD that was a fairly clear call to action; when the error called out something recognizable as the name of part of a driver; but that is mostly just a special case of the "did you change any hardware or update any drivers recently?" troubleshooting steps that people have been doing more or less blind since forever; admittedly slightly more helpful in cases where as far as you know the answer to those questions is 'no'; but windows update did slip you a driver update; or a change in OS behavior means that a driver that used to work is now troublesome.

Realistically, as long as the OS provides suitable support for being configured to collect actual crash dump material if you want it; it's hard to object too strongly to the idea that just rebooting fairly quickly is probably the better choice vs. trying to make the BSOD a genuinely useful debugging resource; especially given how rare it is for the person with useful debugging ability to happen to be at the console at the time of crash(rather than just an end user who is ill equipped to make sense of it; or a system that mostly does server stuff, quite likely not on actual physical hardware, where nobody has even touched the physical console in months or years; and it's more or less entirely useless to display a message there; rather than rebooting and hoping that things come up enough that management software can grab the dump files; or giving up and leaving the system in EMS so that someone can attach to that console.

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